The Printer's Eye: Ukiyo-e from the Grabhorn Collection

Melissa M. Rinne

Softcover | 22.86 x 1.91 x 29.85 cm | 184 pp

Asian Art Museum of San Francisco | 2013 | 9780939117604

Edwin Grabhorn (1889 1968), co-founder of the Grabhorn Press, Northern California's premier letterpress printer, was a pioneer American collector of Japanese prints. The Grabhorn prints in the collection of the Asian Art Museum comprise the upper echelons of the original collection. The subjects include courtesans of the floating world, well-known kabuki actors and famous locales, by consummate masters such as Suzuki Harunobu, Kitagawa Utamaro and Toshusai Sharaku. The collection also includes a superb selection of early monochrome and hand-coloured ukiyo-e prints by Sugimura Jihei, Torii Kiyonobu, Okumura Masanobu and others, from the seminal decades of the woodblock print production in the late 1600s and early 1700s.

This book marks the first time these prints were published in quantity for a wide audience. Leading scholars David Waterhouse and Julia Meech provide in-depth looks at the prints in their Japanese contexts and at Grabhorn's role as a print collector. Large full colour reproductions all 140 of the Grabhorn prints in the Asian Art Museum's collection are accompanied by brief entries by Melissa Rinne.